Shiben Banerji
Affiliation
University of California, Berkeley
Title
Associate Professor
Address
Department of History of Art
Berkeley, CA
94720
USA
About My Work
I am interested in the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture. My classroom teaching and historical scholarship are animated by three questions. First, how did architects in early modern Europe describe their interest in the nature of political oratory at the very moment that they began studying architectural forms that were not derived from Roman antiquity? Second, how did architects across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia mediate new conceptions of public association in the context of nineteenth-century colonialisms, and how did concomitant experiments in old and new media present architectural and urban space as objects of artistic depiction and literary invention? Third, how did twentieth-century theorists of alternatives to liberal modernity in the ex-colonial world conceptualize the work of architectural media in altering perception and consciousness?
Citations
Banerji, Shiben. Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025.
__. “Garden City.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Edited by Kevin Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780190922467-0033
__. “A Theosophical Garden City: Designing Household Life in Bombay, circa 1924.” Planning Perspectives 34, no. 1 (2019): 65–90. (online, July 2017).
doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1357493
Professional Associations
Society of Architectural Historians
Rhetoric Society of America
International Planning History Society
Society for City and Regional Planning History
Shiben Banerji is an associate professor in the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025), which was supported by a Mellon Junior Fellowship in the Humanities + Urbanism + Design from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as by a Publication Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Trained as an architect, planner, and historian, Shiben is also the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies (Intermezzo, 2025). Shiben is currently completing Time on the Road to Civil Rights, which recovers the salience of planning in civil rights discourse.